Many software products are grouped together to create a “software bundle” targeting a business scenario during sales and services. The bundle has a solution for single or multiple levels of the software stack for the target business scenario, such as Services Level, Monitoring and Management Level, Virtualization Level, operating system (OS) Level, Network Level and/or Hardware Level. When creating the software bundle, a decision needs to be made on the combination of software products (and their releases) that should be grouped into the bundle. For each level, there may be potentially many candidate products that can be part of the bundle. Each product installation, configuration, operation and maintenance requires resources (at the customer end if the bundle is sold as a product or at the service provider end if the bundle is offered as a service). Different products have different dependencies on other products required for their installation. Further, each product may be integrated to only a subset of candidate products for other layers.
Consumability is a measure of a customer's end-to-end experience with a solution. Key consumability aspects include: 1) identifying the right product, 2) acquiring the product, 3) installing and configuring the product, 4) using and administering the product, 5) troubleshooting problems with the product and 6) updating the product (e.g., installing fix packs).
An important criteria when evaluating candidate bundles for a target business scenario is their value to the customers. The value of a bundle/product to a customer depends on its consumability as well as the technical features offered. Further the value is a subjective measure, depending on the size of the customer (i.e., large enterprise, small-to-medium (SMB) or home user) and the market (i.e., financial, retail or data centers) where the customer operates. A large firm may be willing to buy a tool that is difficult to install and requires more man hours to learn it and make it work, but offers advanced features (as compared to a tool that is easier to install and make work but offers less features and flexibility). On the other hand, SMB firms tend to buy other tools which offer less features but are easier to install and work with and thus have high consumability.
It is desirable to have a solution with a higher consumability so as to improve the user experience. Thus, firms tend to invest in improving consumability of products/solutions constituting a software bundle during the sales phase. Normally there is a limited budget to invest and an important decision is to improve consumability of those products which have a higher impact on user experience. Thus there is a need to identify software products for improving consumability and the amount of resources to allocate to them from a limited budget.
Therefore, techniques to improve consumability of software bundles for a target business scenario would be desirable.